December, All Over, Again
How trite, but true, to say that this year flew. It's December? Again? Yes.
A month that brings twinkle lights, Christmas cookies, office parties, holiday concerts, and gift-giving can also bring...stress. Exhaustion. Frustration. And other emotions, as well. Enter the December Photo Project (DPP), wherein I (and other like-minded camera-owning souls) will endeavor to take time to notice and celebrate the goodness of the season. Or even just the individual moments of the season, before it all rushes by in one big cinnamon-scented garland-bedecked blur.
(Sign up here if you want to play along with DPP! If you're not a blogger you could still post pics to their Flickr pool or Facebook page.)
For my first photo of the season, I decided to go all out and present you with this crappy camera-phone pic:
Hard to tell, but that's the former governor of New York, David Paterson. I was sitting two tables away, at the Salvation Army Annual Luncheon (I wrote about the event two years ago, here).
This was my third time attending the luncheon, and I remembered several things from years past: the coffee, the brassy carols, the miniature red kettles as centerpieces, the opening prayer, the closing song ("Joy to the World").
What I had forgotten was my propensity to want to cry frequently throughout the luncheon. One of the speakers told a (just slightly cheezy) story about a small town Christmas pageant, and I thought, "Oh crap, I'm gonna cry." Someone read the Christmas story (the one about Jesus, not Ralphie) and as soon as he said the words, "And there were shepherds..." I thought I might lose it again.
Then they showed a video about the Salvation Army's services, focusing on the work they do in the Greater New York area. And the stories of individual lives, transformed, made me tear up all over again. They do good work. They've been doing good work for nearly 150 years.
(No presh, but if you feel like dropping some change into a virtual red kettle, it's easy-peasy: https://donate.salvationarmyusa.org/)
So. An annual luncheon. This annual photograpy project. December is here, again. Let's see how it goes?
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